March 22 2025 Work Party

Mallards, American robins, Spotted Towhees. An otter, a salamander. Raptors, maybe red-tailed hawks? Willows staked along the south bank just weeks ago budding, osoberry, red elderberry, and snowberry becoming green. We reached the tree that a month ago seemed so far away, revealed a goat track hidden by brambles, pulled barbed wire out of the ground. A collapsing empire, cancer, hospice. These things cannot be left behind, but despite their presence, for a moment that stretches to hours, I feel ease.

December 29 2024 Walk

Restful solitude, nourishing until the days wear into claustrophobic sameness. Glass door. Rain. Tea. Chair. Keyboard. Caretaking. Glass door. Rain. Thoughts pile up, crowd worn tracks, dress themselves up for disturbing nighttime scenes. I sleep for a day, stumble into an anatomy of melancholy, wonder if the tech billionaires have found a way into my busy brain. Still rain. Still genocide, still oligarchy, still authoritarianism rising, still greed and profit and planetary destruction, still not enough affordable housing, still a sixth mass extinction, still all the suffering I cannot control. I don’t want to move, but I do. I go outside, walk through the seasonal stream, across the swampy field. I notice the growth at the tips of the conifers, the leaves sprouting from the spirea, the buds on the osoberry. The baby ferns nestled in mulch rings, the advancing cottonwoods, the rain hitting my upturned face. None of it erases the suffering. It is there. Right next to this quiet joy.

November 23 2024 Work Party

Thirteen loppers, 11 clippers, 10 root slayers, five little shovels. Four hundred harvested and supplied willow stakes, 116 potted plants laid out by the maintenance contractor. One snake skin, three copies of The Serviceberry, four steady goat feet. 105 Scirpus microcarpus, an unspecified number of harvested willow whips, an uncountable blanket of red cedar seedlings huddled under tiny rectangular skylights. Two fleeting moments of rain, so light it barely whispered. Three hours well spent.

June 1 2024 Work Party

We took a field trip this week to the main entrance of ƛ̕ax̌ʷadis Park for a special restoration work party in partnership with the City of Kenmore, Confluence Environmental Company, and Mid Sound Fisheries Enhancement Group. We worked in a wetland area on the peninsula between Swamp Creek and the Sammamish River to remove reed canary grass, yellow flag iris, and Himalayan blackberry so that native rushes, sedges, and willow can continue to establish themselves there. It was a treat to work in a different location and off the boardwalk and an honor to tend to a wetland. We’re looking forward to going back in three months!

February 17 2024 Work Party

“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.” ―Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

You help make my present not only inhabitable, but also joyful. Thank you.